BOLHÃO 12 OF 12, THEN AND NOW

Câmara Municipal do Porto

The image above shows the current project for the renovation of the Bolhão. It has been lauded left, right and center for keeping its function as a market (previous schemes had housing, offices, a shopping center and even a high-rise!). It has the merits of restoring all the original features of the building, cleaning it up without in-your-face modernist additions. That is, for the façades facing the streets; inside, as you can see, all the lovely Barracas which we’ve been documenting will be gone in favor of a generic, standard-looking “modern reinterpretation”.

Here we offer a quick rendering of what the market would look like with the restored market stalls. We believe they can be repaired and cleaned up of all the later, spurious additions. They should be easily updated with simple new infrastructure and would be perfectly compatible with a permanent, beautiful and contemporary glass and steel cover in-between.

Renovating the Barracas, and not demolishing them, is the key to making the new Bolhão a truly extraordinary project.